Vox(23)

We walk to the bus together, as quiet as we’ve been on all the other days of the school year. I have words now, but no idea how to use them, no clue how to make my daughter’s life better, if only for a while.

“No more scary dreams, right?”

Sonia nods again. Of course, she wouldn’t have had any nightmares last night, not with the small dose of Sominex I stirred into her cocoa. Patrick still doesn’t know about that, and I’m not sure I’ll tell him.

“Be good in school,” I say, and help her clamber up on the bus.

Be good in school. What a crock of shit.

I imagine my daughter sitting behind a desk, one of that kind that has the cubby under the seat where books and bright Hello Kitty pencil cases and, later, secret notes spelling Do you like Tommy? I think Tommy likes you! would hide. Formica-laminated writing surfaces where you scratched hearts and initials, or where you traced the carvings of some other boy or girl in some other year, wondering if BL ever married KT or if Mr. Pondergrass the algebra teacher really was a pig-monster with eye boogers. Black-and-white composition books, later thinner and bluer when the writing assignments shifted from “What I Did During Summer Vacation” to “Compare and Contrast Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth.” All those things, simple and ordinary, that we assumed we would never lose.

What do they study now, our girls? A bit of addition and subtraction, telling time, making change. Counting, of course. They would learn counting first. All the way up to one hundred.

When Sonia entered first grade this past fall, the school held an open house. Patrick and I went, along with the rest of the parents. I never saw the announcement that was sent to the fathers—or grandfathers, in the event one of the girls was a Heather with two mommies. Of course, there aren’t any two-mommy or two-daddy families anymore; the children of same-sex partnerships have all been moved to live with their closest male relative—an uncle, a grandfather, an older brother—until the biological parent remarries in the proper way. Funny, with all the talk before of conversion therapy and curing homosexuality, no one ever thought of the foolproof way of getting gays in line: take away their kids.

I suspect attendance at the open house that night was mandatory, although Patrick didn’t say so, only urged me to go check out the facilities, which were supposed to be state-of-the-art.

“State-of-the-art what?” I said, checking my counter before speaking.

An hour later, we found out.

There were still classrooms, complete with desks and projection screens. The bulletin boards were wallpapered with drawings: a family picnicking here, a man in a suit holding a briefcase there, a woman wearing a straw hat and planting a bed of purple flowers in another corner. Children on a school bus, girls playing with dolls, boys arranged in a baseball triangle. I didn’t see any books, but, of course, I hadn’t expected to.

We didn’t spend much time in the classrooms before teachers, each one wearing a small blue P pin on his collar, marched us along the corridors for the tour.

“Here’s the sewing room,” our group leader said, opening a set of double doors and motioning us inside. “Each girl—once she’s old enough to work the machines without pulling a Sleeping Beauty”—he laughed at his own joke—“will have her own digital Singer. Really amazing equipment, these.” He stroked one of the sewing machines as if it were a pet. “Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll have a peek at the kitchens before heading outside to the gardening area.”

It was home ec on drugs, and not much more.

I wave to Sonia as the bus pulls away from the curb. Today, she’ll be in a room with twenty-five other first graders, all girls. She’ll listen to stories, practice her numbers, help the older students in the kitchen as they cut cookies and knead dough and crimp pies. This is what school is now, and what school will be for some time. Maybe forever.

Memory is a damnable faculty.

I envy my only daughter; she has no recall of life before quotas or school days before the Pure Movement took off. It’s a struggle to remember the last time I saw a number greater than forty on her fragile wrist, except, of course, for two nights ago when I watched that number creep upward to one hundred. For the rest of us, for my former colleagues and students, for Lin, for the book club ladies and the woman who used to be my gynecologist and Mrs. Ray, who will never landscape another garden, memory is all we have.

There’s no way I can win, but there’s a way I can feel like a winner.

In the minute it takes to walk back across the street and climb the steps to our porch, I decide.

Patrick has the television on, and Reverend Carl is holding a press conference. The White House room looks much the same as it always did, except there are no women, only a sea of dark suits and power ties. All of the reporters nod as they listen to Reverend Carl’s updates on Bobby Myers’ condition.

“We have someone who can help,” Carl says.

A chorus of “Who?” and “Where did you find him?” and “Wonderful news!” rips through the press hall. Patrick interrupts his watching and turns to me. “That’s you, babe. Back in business.”

But I don’t want to be back in business, not for Bobby Myers’ sake or the president’s sake or the sake of any of the other men in that room.

Reverend Carl does his usual double-handed press of the air in front of him, as if he’s deflating an air mattress. Or squashing some weaker object. “Now, everyone listen up. What we’re doing is a little unconventional, a little radical even, but I’m sure Dr. Jean McClellan is the right person for the job. As many of you know, her work on the reversal of”—he checks his notes to get the technical wording right—“fluent aphasia, also known as Wernicke’s aphasia, was groundbreaking. Of course, that work has been on temporary hold until we get things sorted out, but I want to say—”